Poll: What makes something good? Is it the presence of good or the absence of bad?
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8 replies
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - some dude quoted in Civ 4
Absence of bad.
Without thinking too much I would say the ratio between good and bad. But if I really had to choose one or the other I think the presence of good is more accurate, because it seems to me that people willingly go through many bad things to get good things, or are willing to endure many bad things they didn't choose in the hope for good things.
It is obviously the presence of good. As the absence of bad would make it not bad instead of good. This is just framing bad grammar as a philosophical question. When we use words with intent and stick to largely agreed upon meanings, we can rid ourselves of the trivial ponderances like this one that plague philosophy subs.
Edit:
To expand on that a bit more we could ask:
What makes something red? Is it the presence of red or absence of blue?
When asked in this way, it is obvious that the presence of red is necessary unless we redefine red as anything absent of blue.
To be fair, even ancient greek philosophers sometimes struggled with, separating linguistic things from metaphysics. This often happens, when people speak only one language.
To offer some fairness to myself regarding the bad grammar... In earlier revisions of the question, I found that a lot of words I wanted to use carried too much weight and baggage. I didn't want to bias the question with them. So I went with the most generic and childish language that could capture the essence.
Words like evil, excellence, error, virtue; They all mean very specific things to different people. Rephrased with more mature verbiage, it's still an interesting question but doesn't seem as broad. What is excellence? Is it driven more by the presence of things that are excellent or the general absence of error? If the first, what does it mean for those things to be excellent?
That is an interesting and nearly identical question. One downside of this question is that not everyone is caught up in trying to be excellent. Many people don't care what is "excellent." But everyone cares what is good and what isn't so good. But maybe that simplified speech is beneath some people.
What is virtue? Is it the absence of evil? These all end up asking a slightly different question, instead of the broadest question.
Neither. A thing (or person) cannot be intrinsically good or bad. They can have good or bad qualities.
The cup is half full of good.
Excuse the wordiness, but my intuitive and immediate answer to this, after a couple of ales, is that good and bad are not discrete and binary but are usually a continuum of the same value judgement or quantities of the same thing:
Five strawberries - tasty, ten strawberries - meh, fifty strawberries - feeling a bit sick.
An occasional and considered compliment - kind, constant praise - sycophantic and obsequious.